1. Technical Field
This invention relates to a battery charger, and in particular to a battery charger having a planar surface on which one or more battery powered devices may be placed for battery recharging through induction. The invention also extends to a battery charging system for use with conventional electronic devices and that allows conventional electronic devices to be charged using the battery charging system of the present invention.
2. Background Information
Portable electronic equipment such as mobile phones, handheld computers, personal data assistants, and devices such as a wireless computer mouse, are normally powered by batteries. In many cases, rechargeable batteries are preferred because of environmental and economical concerns. The most common way to charge rechargeable batteries is to use a conventional charger, which normally consists of an AC-DC power supply (in case of using the ac mains) or a DC-DC power supply (in case of using a car battery). Conventional chargers normally use a cord (an electric cable for a physical electrical connection) to connect the charger circuit (a power supply) to the battery located in the portable electronic equipment. The basic schematic of the conventional battery charger is shown in FIG. 1.
Inductive electronic chargers without direct physical electrical connection have been developed in some portable electronic equipment such as electric toothbrushes where because they are designed to be used in the bathroom in the vicinity of sinks and water, it is not safe to provide a conventional electrical connection. Various known inductive type chargers, however, use traditional transformer designs with windings wound around ferrite magnetic cores as shown in FIG. 2. The main magnetic flux between the primary winding and secondary winding has to go through the magnetic core materials. Other contactless chargers proposed also use magnetic cores as the main structure for the coupled transformer windings.
A contactless charger using a single primary printed winding without any EMI shielding has been proposed for portable telecommunications/computing electronics. However, the magnetic flux distribution of a single spiral winding has a major problem of non-uniform magnetic flux distribution. As illustrated further below, the magnitude of the magnetic field in the centre of the core of a spiral winding is highest and decreases from the centre. This means that if the portable electronic device is not placed properly in the central region, the charging effect is not effective in this non-uniform field distribution. Furthermore, without proper EMI shielding, undesirable induced currents may flow in other metallic parts of the portable electronic equipment.